Full Page Cache comparison: Amasty FPC vs Magento Enterprise FPC

Hello to Amasty blog readers. We continue to publish articles on using cache for Magento.

Our customers frequently ask us how much faster Amasty Full Page Cache is, compared to Magento Enterprise Full Page Cache. And we couldn’t answer this question with precise numbers, as we didn’t actually run comparison tests. As the number of questions grew with time, we finally decided to run a test and show some exact results to our customers.

Also, we are often asked a question: why do all the extensions on our demo server work faster than those installed on our clients’ servers?

Such a result is obtained thanks to what is under the hood of our server: it’s a dedicated server with powerful processors, large RAM size and a fast SSD storage.

So, in order not to confuse our readers and to push the results closer to reality, we used a virtual server with more common configuration. Also, this configuration is what we always advise as minimal required setup for working with Magento.

FPC comparison test procedure

As always, we use Apache jMeter for performance tests. I ran rounds of tests for 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 simultaneous users. We have already described the test procedure in the previous Amasty research: Full Page Cache vs Varnish Cache article and were asked to share the test so the users could run it on their own servers.

When testing Amasty Magento Full Page Cache, we turned off the built-in Enterprise Full Page Cache by editing app/etc/modules/Enterprise_PageCache.xml file to make sure that Enterprise FPC code won’t influence the test results.

Similar to this, Amasty Full Page Cache was turned off by editing app/etc/modules/Amasty_Fpc.xml and app/etc/modules/Amasty_Fpccrawler.xml files when testing Enterprise FPC.

Here’s the procedure scenario:

go to homepage

search ‘shirt’

filter by ‘sale’ category

go to ‘Slim fit Dobby Oxford Shirt’ product page

add the product to cart

go to ‘Men / Blazers’ category

go to ‘Men / New arrivals’ category

add ‘Linen Blazer’ product to comparison

add ‘Khaki Bowery Chino Pants’ product to comparison

show product comparison page

Thus, the procedure scenario consists of 10 actions, performed in parallel for 10, 20, 30 etc users, and each test iteration is repeated 10 times, so we can calculate an average time of each action execution and an average time of the whole iteration as well. If an error occurs during the test execution, the execution stops. By the way, we didn’t get any errors during the procedure.

Here are the test results:

To give you better understanding of the results, we built some charts by number of users:

Amasty FPC vs Magento Enterprise FPC test results

As we can see from the charts, Amasty Magento Full Page Cache is ahead of Magento Enterprise Full Page Cache for most of the actions.

To give you the understanding of how this works for your business, here’s the table of performance improvement you can get if you replace Magento Enterprise Full Page Cache with Amasty Magento FPC.

In short, Amasty FPC adds around 20% to your Magento store’s performance, though the results are different depending on the action, worse for comparison and much better, up to 40% performance growth for some points.

I hope this article was helpful for you. If you have any questions about the test or the work of Magento Full Page Cache, I’ll be happy to help.

About The Author

Andrei believes that only at work people can fully express themselves, so he does his best to implement all his knowledge while in the office. Having made computer science his hobby, Andrei is constantly developing his professional skills. But despite such a busy schedule he always finds time to read science fiction books and communicate with new interesting people.

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Your extension is good and it does improve performance but have experienced issues on multiple occasions with this extension.

Issue is with the cross link of customer order details, ie wrong order details for a customer. Has happened 3 separate occasions across various websites so had to turn it all off.

Reply

3 years ago

Ksenia Dobreva

Hey there,

thanks for commenting – and we’re sorry that you experienced issues with the extension. I’m not exactly sure what is happening at your side, but if you have any questions on extension’s performance – feel free to shoot an email at support@amasty.com, and our specialists will help you right away.

Reply

3 years ago

Daniel

Hi Ksenia,

I was wondering if this was resolved for Aj? I have heard about this problem before regarding customer sessions being mixed up (Eg. Logged in as John but on a different page, it would show Fred’s account and his shopping cart). It has to do with Magento getting mixed up with the sessions because they are cached.

This is preventing me from using any full page cache extension.

Reply

3 years ago

Ksenia Dobreva

Hi Daniel, thanks for your question. These things may happen if the customer block and shopping carts are cached – this is the most common situation, when the theme is using custom block names. In that case, you can add them to the extension config and exclude from caching. But I can’t see exactly what’s happening on your store. You can install our extension and see if this works for you, and our support department is always happy to help you with the settings (and there’s a 30 days money back period, so you can be sure that you won’t… Read more »